Human touch

The Museum Of Hypothetical Lifetimes offers a fun way to look at your life.

PEDRO REYES at the Power Plant (231 Queens Quay West), to September 1. 416-973-4949. Rating: NNNN

At a gallery you're usually an observer, taking in visuals that move or puzzle you. Pedro Reyes is one of several contemporary artists who are shaking up that safe role, making art by constructing situations for human interaction rather than creating and displaying tangible artworks.

A Mexican who's worked as an architect, Reyes brings his social practice project Sanatorium here after stops in Kassel, Germany, New York City and London. Trained volunteer "therapists" in white coats guide you through a choice of six "treatments." At busier times you may have to make an appointment.

Citing a desire to de-professionalize and de-stigmatize psychotherapy, Reyes sets up situations that can be approached playfully or seriously. References to religious rituals cast the art museum as a kind of secular church.

As someone with a fraught history as a psychotherapy client, I found activities that employed familiar therapeutic practices too close for comfort. Vaccine Against Violence, for example, involves breaking a balloon on which you've drawn the face of someone who's hurt you, but the safety to summon deep emotions really hasn't been established.

Fun activities work better: The Museum Of Hypothetical Lifetimes, a table divided into sections for different aspects of your life, on which you place selections from a collection of small toys and objects; or Citileaks, in which your written confession becomes a message in a bottle and you get to read someone else's.

For $10 you can try Goodoo, voodoo for positive intentions, in which you attach symbolic items to a cloth doll that you take home. The Philosophical Casino features large dice with quotes from philosophers that serve as a cerebral Magic 8 Ball.

I wasn't able to try the group activity Reyes designed for Toronto, The Extraction Of The Cop In The Head. Judging from staffers' comments, this seems to be one of the least popular, and I wonder why Reyes thought this somewhat confrontational role-playing would work in reserved Canada.

Nevertheless, it's a refreshing experience to visit a gallery where people not only talk to you but are interested in your story.